Monochrome BBS

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Monochrome BBS, known to users as "Mono", was originally a student bulletin board system at City University in the early 1990s, consisting mainly of a set of discussion files organised into a tree structure: there are collections of files on current affairs, technology, medicine, entertainment, lifestyles, various hobbies and sports, and so on.

The system was originally written by David Brownlee as a final year project. After nine years it moved out of City and into private hosting. Most of the first users were from City, but there was soon a mix from other JANET sites; few of its current users are now students.

Monochrome is still host to a vibrant community, and is available via telnet or SSH; there is no web front end, although a Java-based Telnet client is available on Monochrome's web site.

There is no cost to users, although donations to the Monochrome Equipment Fund are used to assist in the purchase of hardware upgrades.

[edit] Technology

Users connect to Monochrome via telnet or SSH. There are a wide variety of clients for this purpose, such as PuTTY.

The server cluster runs NetBSD, and consists of a single central server and several client machines. Users connect to the client machines, which in turn interrogate the central server in order to process the user's commands, and handle rendering the results. This implements a form of redundancy - users may still access Monochrome even if one or several of the client machines fail. Most of the communication between the client and the server is cross process using sockets, but files are directly read from the server via NFS. This means it is not currently possible to host a remote client outside of the cluster (unless the entire NFS volume were to be globally accessible, which would pose a large security risk).

Most of the core client and server code is written in C, though a number of additional utilities have been written in Perl.

The cluster features a mix of Sun Microsystems (such as SPARCstation) and PC hardware.